


the living & unseen

by Catherines_Collections



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Altered Mental States, Delusions, Gen, Hallucinations, Mental Disintegration, Mental Instability, Schizophrenia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-03
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-03-12 20:40:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13555176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catherines_Collections/pseuds/Catherines_Collections
Summary: “You’re a joke, you know,” Elle says.“And you’re a ghost,” Spencer says back, not glancing up from his book and pointedly ignoring the look Hotch sends his way..Or, in which Spencer’s schizophrenia manifests itself in the form of Elle.





	the living & unseen

**Author's Note:**

> this took, so long. i've had this idea for so long, and it still didn’t come out right. Whatever. 
> 
> Also when I first had this idea I got curious & looked for fic AND FOUND THIS AMAZING ONE called Into the Blue by copperleaves. So, go read that it’s great. 
> 
> This is set probably around early Season 3 to mid-season 
> 
> I own nothing, enjoy!

She appears one day, suddenly.

Loud and completely out of place in a space that was once her home, and he doesn’t question it.

Morgan says nothing about the familiar face in the room, and so neither does Reid. He takes a breath and closes his eyes when he tilts his head back slightly for a sip of coffee, only to snap them back open by the time he lowers his cup.

He focused on the case ahead, watches JJ give the briefing and listens to Morgan question it. He doesn’t look to the edge of the conference room, to the filing cabinets and the voice _tsking_ at a scattered pile of case fills, until after the briefing and the room has cleared.

When he turns, he feels he is giving in to the inevitable.

“Hello, Dr. Reid,” She says, politely.

The first words she says to him in over two years, and their still tinged with the same sort of rebellion and well hidden danger she came and left in.

“Hi, Elle.” Spencer says back, and watches as her lips lift into a smile.  
  
.

It starts simple, in things easily dismissed and brushed aside.

In misplacing his keys, or taking days longer to finish certain books because he can’t focus right. Things he doesn’t usually do, but are easy enough to brush aside rather than face the alternatives.

It’s when sleep becomes more evasive, less frequent between cases, trauma, insomnia, and stress adding into each to the point where it’s easier to just stay awake then sleep. He blames it on the cases. It’s only half true.

Soon the insomnia evolves into red eyes and unfocused briefings, spinning crime scenes and more frequent headaches, and he knows something's wrong, but it’s not enough yet. _It’ll pass_ , he thinks. Repeats it until he almost believes it.

It’s in the office when Morgan asks him in passing what day it is and Reid- blanks, and his stomach drops. Morgan raises an eyebrow at his silence.

“Too many all-nighters, pretty boy.” Morgan chuckles, winking as he passes.

Reid laughs and excuses himself to the bathroom.

He spends the first five minutes puking and the next ten caught in a panic attack.

He fixes himself in the mirror before he leaves. Hands still shaking, but he blames it on the coffee when he catches Prentiss staring.

No one questions it.

.

Their latest case is in Arizona so after their briefing Hotch says, “Wheels up in thirty.”

Spencer gets his Go-bag.

.

Their latest Unsub has a thing for petite brunette men, and Reid starts dozing off somewhere between the twenty and twenty-fifth missing persons case file. His knee slides against the table and his whole body jumps. He hears Elle laugh.

Morgan raises an eyebrow, asks, “You okay, kid?”

And Reid knows he’s asking out of concern, can tell it in the way Morgan forms the words, the way he’s been trained to read his body language, but it still feels condescending. It still feels like he’s being treated as the baby and a fragile human, and he’s tired of being constantly compared to a kid when he’s the one who was tortured for two days.

He can feel Elle watching them.

“Yeah. I’m fine,” Reid settles on, and tries not to look up to where he feels Elle’s eyes on him.

.

They find the connections between the victims and identify at least seven of them from recent Missing Persons reports.

So it’s no surprise when Hotch enters the room and says, “It’s time to deliver the profile.” It doesn’t stop Spencer’s stomach from dropping, though.

They follow him out to where the small county’s police force has gathered and repeat what they’ve been formulating and rehearsing.

He rotates with Prentiss and Hotch as they give the profile, and holds in his flinch every time he hears or has to say _schizophrenia._

They catch the guy in three days with only two additional victims.

It’s not their best work, definitely not his, but at least they catch him.

Hotch tells him that should matter. He doesn’t know if it does.

.

“You’re a joke, you know.” Elle says, in the jet on their way back.

She’s leaning against the window beside him, and Spencer almost laughs. He knows he shouldn’t engage her but it’s almost automatic, a sardonic attempt at old banner.  
  
“And you’re a ghost,” Spencer says back, not glancing up from his book and pointedly ignoring the look Hotch sends his way.  

_._

In a way, he thinks, it ends before it even begins.

.

“You could have been something,” Elle says, frowning while Spencer drops his bag onto his bed.  
  
“Same goes for you,” Spencer says back, and doesn’t think too hard about how sad she looks.

Elle laughs.

“Funny. But that’s not how it works for us though, right? None of those happy endings and shit. Just misery piled on top of misery and too many nightmares to boot.”

She clicks her tongue and takes the seat across from him, “And the nightmares just bide their time, and still don’t prepare you for when they finally come true.”

Reid closes his eyes. Elle knocks a book on the ground, and he wonders if anyone else can hear it. He knows they can’t.

He thinks back years, remembers their team growing into a family, and recalls moments in passing and conversations around the idea of mental illness but never directly about it. Nothing accusatory or prying, and no information exchanged or given. He thinks he’s paying for that now.

“It’s a hefty price, huh,” she says, and Spencer can hear her tapping her foot on his apartment floor, a steady beat, “and it just keeps on taking. You never get enough out of it.”

Spencer takes a breath, and falls back onto his bed. 

“Goodnight, Elle,” He says into the silence.  
  
.

Reid spends the next two days in bed, but shows up to work looking as functional as usual. He tries to listen intently throughout the briefing.

“Oh,” Elle says, head thrown back in a laugh at something Prentiss has said. “I like her.”

Elle leans over Prentiss and lays her head on top of her’s. Elle looks at him from under her lashes, “Hotch is pretty good at finding replacements, huh?”

He listens to JJ speaking at the front of the room, and doesn’t look over.

When it’s over he ends up alone with Gideon in the briefing room, both of them slower to the pack up, and he jumps when he notices Gideon watching him.

“You get used to seeing ghosts, you know.” Gideon says, and Reid wonders if there has ever been a time where Gideon couldn’t see right through him. He opens his mouth, closes it, and Gideon smiles, small and self-deprecating.

“Sometimes it’s the ones you can’t save that haunt you, and sometimes it the ones who left before you could.”

For a moment, Reid thinks his heart stops in his chest. He swallows and it resumes its beat.

“Don’t let them rule you,” Gideon finishes, eyes shifting behind Reid, and for a moment he wonders if Gideon can see her too, but he knows, of course, that he can’t, but it doesn’t lessen the meaning to his words.

“I won’t.” Reid forces out, dry and a little choked, and Gideon lets his smile curve so it becomes little less sad. Reid counts it as a win as he exits the office.

 _Progress,_  he thinks, walks faster and ignores the shadow following behind his own.

.

They’ve been tracking their Unsub for almost a week and they finally have him cornered. Hotch doesn’t seem to have noticed Spencer hasn’t been sleeping through any of it. That’s the way he likes it, but Elle’s voice hasn't given him any breaks and so he’s sleep deprived with a gun in hand and voice in his head, about to face a sadist with a love for destroying personal connections.

“Tick tock.” Elle breathes into his ear, and then Morgan’s shouting _go_ and Reid snaps himself back into it.  
  
When he kicks the bedroom door down and rushes in with Morgan he pretends he doesn’t hear her laugh echoing.

“Pretty boy doesn’t like playing by the rules,” Elle whispers, voice reverberating in the back of his mind, and he tries to ignore her shadow leaning up against the side closet door.

.

He wonders if this is what it’s like for his mom- feeling danger lurking around every corner, old friends voices: mocking and smug and mean. Is it like this for her, tangible shapes and familiar faces and something always _there_ even when no one else can see it.

Spencer wonders what she would do if she knew. He doesn’t like the possibilities.

He’ll never tell her, and so he doesn’t think anymore about it.

.

Elle’s in his apartment, again, after their latest case gone wrong, and he feels- empty.

It was a poor exchange with hostages lost and he still can’t get the father’s screams out of his head.

“Anything to share?” He hears Elle’s voice asks.

A sigh and then, “Some of us don’t exactly get the honor of working the field anymore.”

Something angry starts to bubble in his stomach and makes its way up his throat before he can stop it.

“You left.” Spencer says, finally, caving first. The dam breaking when the build up becomes to much, and when he turns to see her, he expects some kind of reaction at least.

Her face is a blank slate, like she hasn’t been waiting for this when he knows she has.

Elle has never been good at giving him what he’s wanted.

“I did.” She says back, arms crossed. Her hair bouncing in that short bob, still watching.

“I don’t-“ Spencer starts, runs a hand through his hair, asks, “Why?”

He tries to make the words flat, noncommittal and professional, but he sees her face fall - hears the desperate edge to his own voice - and knows he’s missed anywhere near neutral by a mile.

Elle cocks her head and scoffs, throws her hands up in exasperation. “Why? Spencer, _why_ is the easiest part! The answer is in the question: it’s the one you already know!”

She takes a step closer and he takes one back. Once, twice, three times until he’s backed up against the wall and she’s inches from his face. She’s smiling, incredulous, and looking at him like she’s searching for something.

“The ‘why’, Spencer,” she says, “is that this job eats you up and spits you out, and I didn’t feel like being chewed up again.”

She backs up two steps, still close but not too much, and Reid lets his body untense.

Elle laughs, and it’s bitter and unkind and everything she was before she left: pure, unadulterated Elle. It hurts more than he thought it would.

“It’s funny, you know, that of all the things you could ask, you asked the one thing you already knew the answer to. Now that- that doesn’t sound like the knowledge hungry, Dr. Reid to me. So tell me then, Spencer,”

She takes a step forward, but he doesn’t move. He swallows, instead.

“Are you afraid of what you’ll hear? I am only _your_ hallucination, after all. So all the knowledge I have is yours. No one else's. In a way I guess you could even call me your truth.”

She smiles again, but this time it’s sad, “Tell me, Dr. Reid. Are you afraid of your own mind?”

He opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again. Nothing comes out.

“Yeah.” Elle says, but she doesn’t sound cocky anymore. “That’s what I thought.”

.

The day Gideon leaves, a note left in his cabin for Reid to find and nothing else, he doesn’t see much of Elle. A shadow here and there lurking, a light whisper or laugh, but nothing tangible.

Reid sits in his apartment after their case and watches the chess board in front of him. He can’t bring himself to move any of the pieces.

He doesn’t know how to feel about any of it.

.

He goes to work and still she’s everywhere.

He does his job, finds bodies, sees blood when he’s not the one bleeding. Tragedy surrounds and encompasses, and it’s nothing like the kinds his mother used to read. These are real, and there’s no deeper meaning to any of it.

He goes to work, he goes home. He doesn’t sleep.

Elle talks to him, but he doesn’t always talk back.

Weeks go by, and he starts to forget you don’t mark a week by how many bodies you’ve found.

.

He skips team dinner, waves off Morgan and Garcia’s concern with a tired smile, and ends up back in his apartment.

He knows he won’t be sleeping, and that isolation isn’t a solution, but still he finds himself in the middle of his apartment kitchen: alone and tired and _angry._

“Maybe it’s not worth it then.” Reid starts and then he can’t stop, the words rush up his throat and clog his chest and there’s something sharp in his chest that cuts almost as sharp as any and every bullet that has ever entered his body.

It _hurts_ , and he laughs because the first thing he thinks of beside the bullet comparison is Hotch congratulating him on feeling something other than apathy and it burns.

He can feel her watching.

“Well?” Reid yells, spinning around and scanning every inch of his apartment. He knows his neighbors can hear him but for once he doesn’t care.

“Aren’t you gonna gloat? You were right! Gideon was right! Come on Elle, you were right! It’s not worth it, none of it is!”

The room stays silent. She doesn’t appear, and eventually he stops spinning and just- stands. Sinks.

“You were right,” Reid repeats, thinks of Gideon and the letter and how Elle left. How she isn’t even _here._

He mutes his phone, and buries his head in his hands.  
  
.

“You’re not here, you know.” Spencer says, and flips to the next page in his book.

Elle smiles, “Yeah, I know that. Do you?”  


.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and Kudos are much appreciated. I’m rhymesofblue on tumblr


End file.
